telco

GTT has been on an acquisition tear lately. They bought Perseus and Giglinx in the last month. "Perseus specializes in the ultra low latency connectivity used by the high frequency trading community," according to Telecom Ramblings. The purchase price was $37.5M plus the assumption of $3M in capital leases.

The other rumor is that Altice which bought Cablevision and Suddenlink is looking at a nearly $2B IPO and will use those proceeds to buy Cox. But that may not happen because Charter now wants to buy Cox.

John Malone, the pioneer cable consolidator, has been all about consolidating cable, telco and wireless.

The news out of small ILECs like TDS and Cincinnati Bell is that fiber to the home is selling well but more importantly is increasing retention and lowering churn. (Customer acquisition costs are very high in flat product segments like consumer broadband, cellular service and TV.)

Even Fairport, acquired by RLEC Consolidated, is upgrading its network for higher speeds. Some of this is due to the fact that cable is winning the broadband war.

In this podcast, I speak with TelePacific's SVP Ken Bisnoff on why TelePacific is re-branding. The CLEC of old is gone. Telecom is shifting to be more than voice and Internet. TelePacific has transitioned to a Managed Services Carrier with its acquisition of DSCI.

Imagine spending billions to not only upgrade plant to handle TV streams, but buy/build cable head-ends, negotiate content, test out set-top boxes, train technicians, ramp up advertising and staff call centers for sales and support. Do all of that to catch up with cable (who are eating your profitable lunch in the T1, DSL and POTS business). And after spending the combined billions for U-Verse, FiOS, PRISM, et al -- you are still losing subscribers because (a) your broadband pipes are slow; and (b) cord cutting hits its stride.

Now imagine that you are so far behind in voice that cablecos are considered the incumbent!

"Put it all together and you can see a day when you're watching content that Google produced disseminated via infrastructure that Google owns on a phone that Google made using wireless service Google brokered." Amazon tried it and failed. Google's phones are nice, but the Fi service has done about as well as Google Fiber.

The opposition - the cellcos, the RBOCs, the ILECs - don't want to be just dumb pipes.